Pokémon is celebrating three decades of pocket monsters with a new official reference book covering every species introduced across the franchise’s first nine generations. Pokémon — Official National Pokédex: 1996-2026 collects all 1,025 Pokémon revealed from the original Red and Green era through Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.
The book is currently confirmed for Japan, where it is priced at ¥2,750. No English-language or wider international edition has been announced yet, leaving overseas collectors waiting to see whether The Pokémon Company plans a broader release.
As an anniversary product, the timing makes sense. Pokémon began in Japan in 1996 and has since expanded far beyond the original Game Boy titles into animation, trading cards, films, merchandise and an enormous catalogue of games. The steadily growing National Pokédex has effectively become a historical record of that expansion, moving from the original 151 creatures to more than a thousand.
The new book is designed as a comprehensive catalogue rather than simply a visual collection. Entries include familiar reference information such as height, weight and evolutionary relationships, while also accounting for the increasingly complicated variety of alternate Pokémon forms introduced over the years.
That means the Pokédex covers mechanics and variations including Mega Evolution, Gigantamax forms, regional variants and Terastallization-related appearances. Those additions matter because modern Pokémon is considerably harder to catalogue than it was during the franchise’s early generations. A single species can now have different designs, typing or transformations depending on the region, game or battle mechanic involved.
For long-time fans, that complexity is arguably what makes a physical National Pokédex interesting in 2026. Most of this information is readily available through games, official websites and fan-maintained databases, so a printed encyclopedia is less about solving an information problem and more about putting 30 years of creature design into one chronological package.
The release also arrives as Pokémon prepares to move beyond its ninth generation. A new mainline game is already planned for 2027, meaning the 1,025-species figure is effectively a snapshot rather than a permanent total. Once another generation introduces its own regional creatures, evolutions and forms, the National Pokédex will grow again.
That makes Pokémon — Official National Pokédex: 1996-2026 particularly fitting as an anniversary release. Instead of trying to anticipate what comes next, it draws a line under the franchise’s first 30 years and documents how dramatically its central roster has expanded since players first chose between Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle.
